


The Roommate Agreement

by Headfulloffantasies



Category: Original Work
Genre: Exorcism, Haunted House, Peanut Butter, Roommate, dave is the worst, ghost - Freeform, ghosts love peanut butter, they were roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 09:57:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19944283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Headfulloffantasies/pseuds/Headfulloffantasies
Summary: When Ben put an ad online for a roommate he wasn’t expecting an undead one.





	The Roommate Agreement

The Roommate Agreement

When Ben put an ad online for a roommate he wasn’t expecting an undead one.  
On Monday he came downstairs to the kitchenette to find his favourite black mug hovering four feet off the ground. Ben rubbed his eyes and stared. He screamed. The mug hurled at his head. Ben ducked. The mug hit the wall behind him, shattering to pieces.  
He stood there in his bathrobe staring at the shards of ceramic in a puddle of black coffee and wondering if he was still dreaming. 

On Tuesday Ben got out of the shower and his breath came out in a frozen cloud. Goosebumps snaked up his arms. Ben’s heart skittered. Two handprints streaked through the steam on the mirror. Ben dove for the door. The doorknob didn’t turn. Ben frantically clawed at it. I am not dying in a bathroom. He slammed his shoulder into the wood, but the door didn’t give. Something cracked behind him. Ben whipped around. Frost crept up the edges of the mirror, creeping towards the dripping handprints.  
“What do you want?” Ben screamed.   
The door clicked open. 

Thursday Ben was sure. He woke up in the middle of the night to a cold breath washing over his face. The room was darker than hell. The breath shifted, exhaling over his blind eyes. Ben was frozen, terror gripping at his heart. The entity leaned closer, the chill spreading over Ben’s skin.   
“Hey little mama let me whisper in your ear.”  
Fudging what?   
Ben hurled out of bed, slapping the light switch. There was nothing but his tossed sheets.  
Ben stared, breaths stuttering and heart pounding. It was time to fudging do something about this.   
Ben got home from work on Friday to find a man standing in his kitchen. Ben dropped his groceries and screamed. “Don’t kill me! Take the TV!”  
The man… flickered? One second he was solid the next he was fuzzy like television static.   
The man was holding a spoon halfway to his mouth. When he flickered, the spoon hit the counter with a clatter.   
The man vanished. Into thin air. Ben’s heart was doing a marathon around his rib cage.   
He crept closer to the counter, holding his hands in front of his face in case the dude was still there, just invisible.   
The spoon on the counter was frosted over. It was full of peanut butter, the open jar sitting next to it.   
“A ghost is eating my peanut butter,” Ben said out loud to confirm how crazy it sounded.  
Fudging what?  
The man flickered back into being. His face was indistinct, like a wave of static kept shifting over the planes of his skin. What Ben got from his face was Eyebrows. The man had big, blocky eyebrows telegraphing his emotions without his face.  
Somehow, knowing the ghost liked peanut butter made him infinitely less scary.  
“Can you cut out the sparks, man?” Ben dared.  
The man flickered.  
“No? You like being sparky?”  
The man flickered.  
“Ok. Sparky it is.”

The ghost seemed docile after that. The ghost mostly kept to himself. After a week, Ben was pretty chill about the whole situation.   
“Hey man, are you going to pay rent?” He finally asked one day. Sparky vanished. Typical.  
The next day, the doorbell scared Sparky into a static tizzy.   
“Hello?” Ben opened the front door.  
A blonde, fit guy with a man bun smiled at Ben.   
“Hey man, I’m Dave. I answered your roommate ad.”   
“Uh,” Ben glanced over his shoulder. Sparky was gone. “Yeah, sure, come in.”  
Dave waltzed passed Ben and spun in a circle, surveying the cramped kitchen.  
“Cool. Where’s my room?”  
Ben blinked. “You want to move in right now?”  
“Yeah, my junk is in the car,” Dave hiked a thumb over his shoulder.  
Sparky flickered into being right in front of the TV.   
“Dude,” Ben warned.   
Dave stared, gaping as Sparky opened his mouth and… sang. It was hard to describe.   
The only way Sparky was able to audibly communicate was through singing. And Ben wasn’t sure “singing” was really the correct term for what he was doing. Sparky opened his mouth and the song he wanted came out. With instruments and a drum line and everything. Like he’d tapped into a radio signal or something. It was bizarre to watch.  
“I knew you were trouble when you walked in…” Taylor Swift’s voice filtered out of Sparky’s mouth.   
“Be polite,” Ben admonished.   
Sparky’s eyebrows knit together. He vanished.  
“That… that was-,” Dave stammered.  
“Um, the TV is weird?” Ben tried.  
“That was a ghost.”  
Great. Now Ben was going to lose the half rent Dave agreed to.  
“We’ve got to kill it.”  
Fudging what? We don’t kill people just because they’re dead, dude.

Dave did not get the memo. Dave wanted to get rid of Sparky with a set of matches. “We’re going to Cremation of Sam McGhee this poltergeist.”  
Ben stared at him blankly.   
“We’re gonna light him up,” Dave explained.  
“I don’t think that’s how the poem goes.”  
“Shaddup.”

“Fire was supposed to work!” Dave hollered from the bedroom he’d boarded himself in.  
Fudging no, Ben thought. Every instinct in him said Sparky had escaped from hell, and as every cartoon Ben had ever watched informed him, hell was full of fire. Lighting Sparky up probably just made him homesick.  
“I told you, he’s chill if you leave him alone,” Ben tried to explain as he passed Dave a coffee. Dave glowered over the rim of his mug.  
“It’s dangerous. It will turn on us. You can’t keep a poltergeist in your house. We need a priest.”  
Ben shrugged, leaning his hip against the table. “I tried that. They’ve all gotten reality checks in the last century.  
“Fine. Time for Plan B. We’ll get an exorcism off the internet.”  
“This is only Plan B?” Ben surrendered his laptop to Dave’s grabby hands.  
“Plan G, whatever. Do you speak Latin?”  
“No one speaks Latin,” Ben informed him. “It’s a dead language.”  
“Just like this ghost! Up top!” Dave offered his hand for a high five.  
Ben pretended he didn’t see the hand. “I told you I don’t want to be a part of killing Sparky.”  
Sparky manifested with a buzz at the mention of his name. His eyebrows pinned together in concern.   
“Hey man,” Ben said affably as Dave scrambled for cover under the coffee table.  
Adele’s voice answered out of Sparky, “Hellooo.”  
Sparky flickered. He came back with eyebrows blown wide in panic.  
Dave was chanting. He had the fudging laptop under the coffee table and he was chanting.  
Sparky flickered. He fizzled out and came back hunched over, clutching at his sides.  
“Stop.”  
Sparky’s eyebrows crouched in pain over his glossed eyes.  
“Stop!” Ben kicked Dave under the table.  
Dave swore and kept chanting.  
Ben dove under the table and wrestled for the laptop.   
Dave clung on. “Let go!”   
“You’re hurting him!”  
Dave bared his teeth as he snarled, “It’s not a him. And it deserves to die.”  
Ben had never been punched in the face before. He kind of wished he could have gone his whole life without knowing what it felt like when someone split their knuckles on your teeth. The underside of the coffee table spun a lackadaisical circuit. Ben shook the pain aside and clambered back to his knees.   
Sparky was on the ground, flickering through a convulsion. His spine twisted unnaturally.   
Dave hunched over the laptop. Every syllable fell like a hammer over Sparky’s flailing body.  
He vanished.  
He’s gone, Ben thought. His gut swooped horridly. Sparky was dead and his killer was still mumbling Latin in a broken accent under Ben’s coffee table. Ben saw red.  
He dragged Dave out from under the table by his man bun, ignoring the squawk of protest. Ben went back under for the infernal laptop. He lifted it over his head and brought it down over the coffee table. Bits of data and hard drive exploded all over the living room, skittering under the TV.   
Ben towered over Dave, “Get. Out.”   
Dave scrambled out the door.  
Ben stood with half a keyboard in his hands.  
To the empty room he asked, “Sparky?”  
Nothing.  
Ben’s stomach clenched. What if he really was too late? How was he going to live with himself knowing his roommate was double dead? A choked sob escaped his lips.  
Ben mechanically moved to the kitchen and pulled together the fixings for a PB and J. Ben’s hands shook as he spread peanut butter over the bread.  
“No crusts?”  
The Friends theme tune played softly from the corner of the couch.  
Ben smiled, “You got it buddy.”

**Author's Note:**

> First original work posted to this site.   
> Come talk to me on tumblr @ https://headfulloffantasies.tumblr.com


End file.
